SharePoint 2010 : State Service issues & problems

I built two SharePoint Enterprise servers in separate farms from scratch using different farms and SQL servers. The first is a development machine to try things out on and the second is the production box.

As with all the best MVP advice you should not use the configuration wizard but manually create each service and for the most part Ive done this successfully, however when we started trying to use Infopath or Reports in Access Web Services we started getting some odd errors such as:

The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service.

And

This report failed to load because session state is not turned on.

This was happening on both the production and development servers which was most odd.

Looking in SharePoint service applications there was no reference to the "State Service" on one of the servers and one line item for "State Service" on the other. Also most odd as both servers had been setup in the same way.

 There is no way to create the State service from the new service application menu as it should have been setup from the SharePoint install, so you either have to use the Configuration wizard or PowerShell.

 In the case of there not being any reference to a State Service I ran a powershell command to create a state service database and then ran the Configuration Wizard with everything possible unchecked apart from the State Service. The powershell command to create the database is "

New-SPStateServiceDatabase" See TechNet for more details

After an IISReset the errors seemed to clear and all was well with one of the servers.

For the other server the same process wasn't an option as the Configuration Wizard already had the State Service Checked. So using Powershell I manually created a State Service Application and State Service Proxy and enabled it all using the commands


New-SPStateServiceApplication
New-SPStateServiceDatabase
New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy
and
Enable-SPSessionStateService

(See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee890113.aspx)

 However after doing all of this successfully and being able to see the State Application and Proxy in the SharePoint Central administration list of service applications the error s still persisted. So using the SharePoint service application screen I deleted the first State Service and the new State Service Proxy and State Service which I had created. This allowed me to run the configuration wizard with only the State Service tick box checked and after another iisreset voila !

Others have also seen this issue - see

Misconfiguration of the MOSS State Service
Pasted from <http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointworkflow/thread/521db715-0d76-49ce-be36-7c37cfb8026f>